How do we stand up for our rights?

Yesterday, one of my teachers sent me an email that carried a link to a particular video in upworthy.com. The subject line was so intriguing as to make procrastination practically impossible. It said, 'two monkeys were given unequal pay...see what happens next!'

 

This was quite fascinating in itself, because we usually think of unequal pay in the context of businesses and disgruntled employees and favoritism. But who would've thought that a researcher would actually see the responses of monkeys to unequal pay!! I was itching to know how the monkeys reacted to such favoritism, and so I promptly started watching the video...

The narrator, Frans de waal, a primatologist, ethologist, and professor of Primate Behavior at Emory University, spoke about how the researcher Sarah Brosnan created the setup for the experiment..... Watch the video, it's much better than my narrating it:

http://www.upworthy.com/2-monkeys-were-paid-unequally-see-what-happens-next?c=upw1

The most amazing thing was that the Capuchin monkeys were much more forthright than us humans in voicing their displeasure at the unfair treatment being meted out to them. The monkey that was being discriminated against actually threw its pay (food) back at the researcher. Humans are so much more concerned about what others would say, that very often we give up on our own rights to stand up for what we want/need and what is good for us.

I wondered whether we need to learn to stand up for ourselves.  I realised that if there are just a few people who stand up for their own rights, there is such a huge population that is ready to criticize them for their 'uncivil' behaviour. The population of naysayers in human community outnumbers the little group of independent thinkers and doers by far. I think it is important for the ideology of standing up for one's rights to be inculcated in the society at large.

Also, it is important to remember that there are many ways of voicing displeasure or opinions. Violence and drastic acts like self-immolation, in my opinion, do not have serve any purpose. 

I feel that society as a whole needs to strike the fine balance of expressiveness and restraint, without tipping the scale towards violence and chaos.